Portrait Ancestry


I used to think the Maori elders
hanging silent in the living room
were my great-grandparents, dead
before I had the chance to know them.

The man had thinning, snow-white hair
and almost-open lips that told me stories, 
when I sat and listened close, 
about the first world war, his garden 
or a fishing trip. The woman’s eyes were black  
and cushioned bright on crinkled skin 
I knew would feel like brown-bag paper 
underneath my lips, were I to climb 
and kiss her canvas face. 

The paintings came from New Zealand,
like my grandma who ate vittamins
and woke us up for morning tea.
She said she’d brought them over
when she first came to the States
to keep a piece of home nearby,
and called them my inheritance
so I could always see where
part of me was from.

I’d close my eyes to listen
to her stories about Auckland,
a carpenter father
and a mother who could sew,
and see the living faces 
of the elders on the wall:
a hammer in his hand,
face gleaming with sweat,
a needle in her teeth;
feet pumping the old 
wrought-iron sewing machine.

Grandma had shown me snapshots
of her parents, black and white
and holding grocery bags, or waving
stiff in Sunday clothes
but they were small and faded,
far away and nothing 
like the warmly lighted
elders underneath whose eyes
I’d played most every day
of my short growing up,

and so I never wondered
why the brown warmth of his skin, 
the moka tattooed green around her chin,
the hui feather robes they wore,
were different from my freckles,
straight brown hair and corduroy:
they just seemed natural to me
familiar in the way of things
you never learned but simply knew about
like blood and breath and mother’s touch.






Ali Fischer